Never did Giulia feel the degradation of her actress' calling more than in the presence of such German critics and their professional malice: a _prima donna_ who had associated on friendly terms with the highest nobility of Italy was compelled to receive with all well-bred affability persons to whom the doors of a drawing-room would never have been thrown open. Often enough had she proudly scorned to wait upon the malicious "gentlemen of the press," while many of her colleagues in velvet trains rustled up the back-stairs to an attic in which some newspaper writer, dangerous to her existence, had his den; but even if her success did not suffer therefrom, at all events on all sides she was told of the witty sallies with which the intellectual reporter revenged himself for this neglect. Of what use to her was all proper indignation? It troubled her to read in every countenance the knowledge of those spiteful _bon mots_, she was given up to public malice; the air in which she breathed was no longer the pure atmosphere of art, it wafted a poisoned pestilential blast towards her, and she preferred to submit to secret humiliation rather than bear the insults to which she was exposed before the whole world. And Giulia was obliged to tell herself that such theatrical criticism only flourished upon German soil! In Italy, in England, in Spain every critic was a _nobile_, a gentleman, an _hidalgo_; even censure is offered with a polite bow, every merited acknowledgment is made to talent and beauty. Never is an artistic performance sacrificed to the unsparing spirit that delights in plucking it to pieces; never do newspapers venture to let an inquisitive ray of light fall into the interior of private life as through an open window shutter, and then to gossip about it with _piquant_ allusions. Giulia thought little of the much-vaunted German piety, she saw that not alone the actors and actresses, but also the original poets themselves were often criticisingly ill-treated by most incapable heads, and that the public did not take part with the richly gifted and nobly struggling talents, but rather carried their homage with utmost complacency to the sparkling conceits of the much promising critic. She certainly did not know that a similar lot had fallen to our classical poets, that a criticism which had a fig-leaf ready for every bare mediocrity picked Schiller's tragedies to pieces as being schoolboy's work, even shortly before their author's death, and that amid the exultation of a numerous crowd a squib sought to destroy Goethe's laurels. All the same, these thoughts, the recollections of many an experience in her intercourse with the representatives of German public opinion, caused her blood to boil more than usually to-day; either the sad mood that overcame her was its cause, or a dim feeling that even in daring defiance she would find a protector in the man who breathed the air of the same town with her.